I don’t propose to naively debate nazis or whatever, you are fine to shoot the wolves at the door (metaphorically, don’t do that with real wolves jeez). But I don’t necessarily agree that the two concepts are as mutually exclusive as being made out in a number of situations.
As long as fascists are attempting entry into liberal democracies beset by high inequality (caused by establishment conservatives who, in the current case in the U.S., also operate in bad faith), the concept is sadly not obsolete. Invoking the spectres of history is therefore still useful, disturbing and provocative and uncivil as it may be. One can do that without directly threatening violence.
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There’s good faith civility, and bad faith civility.
There’s good faith blunt talk, and bad faith blunt talk.
The problem is almost never manners. It’s whether you’re dealing with people who are trying to solve a problem, or protect a problem.
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Eh, tangentially, I don’t like to invoke history except to counter invocations of history. History is unfortunately extremely subjective in its interpretation, and in the ways in which a historical situation applies or does not apply. It often serves to cloud a discussion.
Um, “Fang?”
I’m far less concerned about real four legged wolves causing me harm than I am the local fucking PD. Give me a choice and I’ll take the wolves, every time; my chances of survival are way higher.
Your agreement isn’t a requirement to my will to survive; you’re obviously allowed to think whatever you want.
None of this is an ‘esoteric thought experiment’ for me; it’s all real life with a real, potentially detrimental impact on my life and the lives of those I care about… and we already know that mere politeness won’t save us.
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As a trained historian myself, I can tell you that being aware of the meta-discipline of historiography does not suddenly make actual events of the past off-limits to discussion, even in a context like this (our resident professional historian, @Mindysan33, will probably have a more nuanced view). If you want to go post-modern in regard to either the rise of the Nazis or the French Directory in a way that even Eco wouldn’t, that’s your prerogative, but Bernel wasn’t objecting to the use of the guillotine image in any way on that basis.
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My point is not that this is a esoteric thought experiment, my point is that this frame of reference is hyperbolic with respect to a lot of the situations where this argument comes up, which to a much greater extent occupy a gray area where it’s not really a very great incivility, and it’s not really a great matter of survival that is held in the balance of this particular incivility.
Like, I think if you are claiming a guillotine meme will save your life, that seems tenuous at best, just as tenuous as equating it to civil war.
The question is not your knowledge of history, it’s the knowledge of history of the audience. As established in the guillotine example, the depiction is split between ‘guillotine the fuckers, hell yeah’ and ‘oh no, the terror’.
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The audience here is pretty damned knowledgeable about history. Again, the community’s response to b00fh’s comment versus the response to mine (and others similar to it) bears that out. The pearl-clutching we see time and time again on this site whenever Cory or someone else posts a guillotine image is ridiculous.
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I’m assuming that the audience for the proposed gifs is the entire twitter population.
The pearl-clutching we see time and time again on this site whenever Cory or someone else posts a guillotine image is ridiculous.
Oh then isn’t that uh, kinda a direct contradiction of your point?
If there’s always pearl clutching then there’s clearly a vocal subset of the audience with a very different view of history.
Just because someone complains about a gif, doesn’t mean they don’t also admit it’s harmless.
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I completely agree with that, but then you also have to accept that there is the potential of evil on your own side as well. If you embrace the methods of the other side, using implied death threats, sooner or later someone is going to act on them.
“This is harmful” is a pretty high bar. “This is a poor way to communicate an idea” is what I am going for.
Bernel is more concerned with how the audience here on BB will respond. As far as I know, none of these comments are automatically posted to Twitter.
[If Cory’s guillotine images end up there, I don’t know how much hand-wringing is going on there, because that is a community I choose to avoid because it’s not as knowledgeable as this one.]
If someone is going to give their deeply concerned hot take on the nature of the community here, they should expect some backlash (especially if they haven’t taken the time to get a sense of how knowledgeable and pacifistic the community in general actually is).
That’s assuming good-faith sloppiness, of course – sometimes people will double-down rather than admit they were wrong [ETA: or tadmit hat their opinion is consciously or unconsciously informed by the factors described succinctly by @DukeTrout below]
There are other commenters who come here knowing exactly the nature of the community specifically to concern-tr0ll in bad faith (those ones do indeed take a different view of history – a counter-factual one where Nazis are tragic heroes and where white American males are the most oppressed group of them all).
Discussed and debated in this reference topic:
[Might as well consider this a continuation of that topic]
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Or they have a vested interest in not upsetting the apple cart, a.k.a. they are either part of the power establishment, dependent on the power establishment, or too timid to envision upsetting the power establishment.
They might know exactly the history, and don’t care or haven’t the will to stand up to authoritarians.
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Truer words…
I think you’re over-abstracting your points.
Stripping context is a great way to never agree on whether any particular instance of speech is “justified” or “effective”.
Every image and every word can be funny or threatening in context, and that’s why specifically the President of the United States likening journalists to traitors who should be treated as enemies of the state, is a “civility error” of many magnitudes more profundity, than somebody calling for a guillotine gif in a comment thread.
The error is in treating speech out-of-context and perspective, and not including any judgment based on how a specific instance tracks to actual harm and risk of harm.
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But systems of online communication tend to strip context constantly. It’s the default way in which we reference and discuss. See for example the use of quotes in this and your comment 
Crappily designed, poorly moderated platforms devoid of anything approaching community do. This is not Twitter or Facebook, though.
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Not an useful argument IMO. This is basically pre-supposing bad faith.
And like, er, almost all of us have some vested interest in not upsetting the apple cart. Few people live entirely separate from capitalism and its power structures.
No. Quoting in a discussion is not stripping all context for the reader, because you apparently understand that it’s a quote of something else said in the thread. You didn’t ask me “What do those quotation marks mean? What is reality?”
If you feel talking about specific things, and specific comments is not abstract enough to get at the real truth of something, maybe you should argue your point in mathematic notation, showing all your work, proofs, and assumptions along the way? I’d be happy to rebut when you’ve got that ready.
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